1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to computer-aided registration of raster data with vector data.
2. Background Art
A geographic information system (GIS) is a system for archiving, retrieving, and manipulating data that has been stored and indexed according to the geographic coordinates of its elements. A classic problem for geographic information systems is the registration of misaligned vector data and raster data, the vector data typically representing road information and the raster data typically representing aerial imagery. There are a number of causes for the misalignment, including obsolete data, projection errors, inaccurate camera models, the absence of a precise terrain model, different data vendors, etc. Traditionally, the misalignment problem has been addressed by a process called conflation, in which a set of control point pairs is specified and the data is warped in a manner so as to align to the control points. With the rapid development of advanced GIS applications such as Google Earth, however, the amount of data is prohibitive for manual alignment correction processes.
What is needed is a robust and practical method for aligning raster and vector data across varying environments.